Sunday, September 27, 2015

Does the 5,000 percent price increase of a generic drug a
symptom of American Big Pharma greed?

By: Ringo Bones

Along with Big Coal and Big Oil Capitol Hill lobbyists, Big
Pharma is now one of the new symbols of corporate greed that causes unnecessary
misery of working class Americans and even people of the rest of the world. And
when the drug company Turing Pharmaceuticals recently acquired the license to
manufacture a 62-year old lifesaving drug that has since become a generic drug
called Daraprim and overnight raised its price by 5,000 percent from 13.50 US
dollars per tablet to about 750 US dollars per tablet, millions of people prescribed
by the drug are soon up in arms. Even though Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin
Shkreli has since roll-backed the 5,000 percent price increase, many now wonder
if Big Pharma exploitation of working class patients are causing yet another
undue suffering. But is Turing Pharmaceuticals 5,000 percent price rise of a
lifesaving generic drug even justified?

Despite Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkrreli saying
that his decision for the 5,000 percent price increase of Daraprim is motivated
by altruism, anyone with a rudimentary working knowledge of economics compare
the move as akin to a luxury sport-scar manufacturer purchasing the rights to manufacture
a South Korean family sedan that used to sell for 6,000 US dollars each and
then increasing its price to 70,000 US dollars overnight. All of which only
highlights the problem of how corporate greed in America and their super-strong
lobbying powers at Capitol Hill is causing undue suffering of Americans and everyone
else on the planet.

Daraprim entered the pharmaceutical market about 62 years
ago as a treatment of the parasitic infection toxoplasmosis and has since been
priced as a generic drug. Given their compromised immune system, the main users
of Daraprim are HIV / AIDS patients who are easily infected by toxoplasmosis
and related infections in comparison to people with normal immune systems.

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Even though measures of eradicating the disease in remote
regions of the world still manage to gain headline news status, did you know
that the polio vaccine in already 60 years old this 2015?

By: Ringo Bones

Back in April 12, 1955, the Salk Polio Vaccine was declared
to be safe for public use after years of Dr. Jonas Salk’s dedicated lab-work to
eradicate one of mankind’s greatest public health scourges. The still evolving
role medical researchers – from cloistered academic eccentric to popular hero –
is in many ways reflected in the history of poliomyelitis research which
reached a dramatic climax with the acclaim lavished on Dr. Jonas Salk for the
introduction of an effective polio vaccine in 1955. But before Salk,
researchers in half a dozen countries had paved the way for polio prevention.
By the first decade of the 20th Century, it was known that polio was
infectious, was transmitted by personal contact and did not always result in
paralysis.

However, the cause of polio had been thought to be bacteria.
Then in 1909 – Dr. Sam Flexner, an American pathologist, finally isolated the
agent responsible: a virus so small it could pass through the finest filters
then in use at the time. But the virus had not yet been found in the
bloodstream of its victims. It was assumed that the polio virus grew only in
nerve cells and at the time a prototype vaccine made from infected nerve tissue
produced side effects sometimes as crippling as the disease itself. Given the
extremely small size of the polio virus, even light rays were deemed “too
coarse” to see it and thus necessitates the use of electron microscopy which a
working one wasn’t invented until 1935. And it wasn’t until 1953 that for the
first time an electron microscope allowed human medical lab workers to “see”
the polio virus after magnifying it 77,000 times with a stream of electrons –
which at the time the most powerful electron microscopes still had trouble
seeing objects tinier than 2 angstroms in diameter.

Forty years after Dr. Flexner’s findings, a team of American
scientists was able, for the first time, to grow polio viruses in non-nerve
tissue after extensive lab work back in 1949. Other researchers had shown that
there were three distinct types of polio viruses which produced identical
symptoms and aftereffects. These viruses proliferate in the lower intestinal
tract and the throat, causing symptoms so mild that they are often overlooked. Occasionally,
however, they enter the bloodstream and eventually attach themselves to nerve
cells, resulting in the dreaded paralytic polio. These discoveries provided the
theoretical basis for the vaccines for they proved that the disease’s path
allows for the production of antibodies that intercept the viruses before they
reach the vital nervous system, where they do their damage.

The first type of polio vaccine which was declared safe for
widespread public use was developed by Dr. Jonas Salk and his lab associates at
the University of Pittsburg using polio viruses killed by formaldehyde which
sets up a protective antibody barrier against polio in the bloodstream. A few
years later, Dr. Albert Sabin of Cincinnati developed the first live polio
vaccine to be put into regular use and it was licensed for use in the United
States back in 1962. Dr. Sabin’s polio vaccine variant generates immunity in
both the bloodstream and intestinal track. And widespread global polio vaccination
programs soon followed suit where as far back as 1958 a live polio vaccine
variant developed by Dr. Hilary Koprowski of The Wistar Institute of
Philadelphia which was applied as a mouth spray was used to vaccinate more than
250,000 Congolese citizens.

It was only in the post-9/11 world that mass polio
vaccination efforts became dangerous to the lives volunteer doctors working for
charitable organizations after various Islamist Terror organizations around the
world started to spread the rumor that the free vaccines used by charitable
organizations cause sterility and mental retardation – thus hampering the
global eradication of paralytic polio as one of the UN’s Millennium Development
Goals. Even as recently as 2003, influential Islamist leaning politicians
managed to ban free mass polio vaccinations just by citing the conspiracy theorists’
claims as evidence. It wasn’t only last year that mass free polio vaccinations
resumed in the most deprived regions of Nigeria when the Emir of Kano recently
took an oral polio vaccine in front of his subjects to show reassurance that
polio vaccines are perfectly safe despite of the flimsy claims of conspiracy
theorists and Nigeria’s Islamist leaning politicians. Despite its proven safety
record for 60 years – conspiracy theorists and even right-wing militant Evangelical
Christians in the United States are refusing to have their children vaccinated
against polio.